Gartner released their Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) 2010 december 2010. This is the second time they release a MQ for this segment. They say it is a market that is in a maturity phase and will continue to change in the coming years. No participants are in the Leaders quadrant this year.

UCaaS is a cloud-based delivery of integrated communications capabilities spanning voice, messaging, conferencing and presence. Businesses should view UCaaS as an emerging alternative to premises-based UC platforms for improving productivity, processes and workflow.

Microsoft is a challenger with its BPOS offering. With Office 365 maybe they can become a leader in the UCasS market as they can offer Lync Online and Office Online in addition to Exchange and Sharepoint. Some of the major improvements in Lync Online is

• Federation is now possible allowing collaboration with federated contacts
• Combine Lync Online with On-Premise deployment as you can with Exchange 2010
• Access to the Lync 2010 client is a benefit in it self

Read the full report here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol14/article13/article13.html